Zoom session to honor John Nissen

This morning, we participated in a Zoom session with the Anderson-Nissen family to honor the seventh anniversary of the death of John Nissen, who died October 6, 2013. His wife, Mary, was in Bennington, his daughter, Erica, and her family (husband, Tom, and children Julian and Clare), in Capetown, South Africa; and his son Mark in Denver (with his partner, Jen), and Tom's mother, near Boston. And of course, Ellen and myself in Vermont. The wonder of the Internet, which makes a small world! 

We started by each lighting a candle and singing "We are marching in the light of God," and then each sharing a memory of John, and finally just "checking in" as to how each of us is doing. It was a very nice occasion, made extra-special for me by Tom's sharing how much I had influenced his life! (I was the minister for his and Erica's wedding). I hadn't realized he felt that way, and I was quite touched by that. He mentioned a poem by Robert Frost which I read at their wedding, Two Look at Two:

Love and forgetting might have carried them 
A little further up the mountain side 
With night so near, but not much further up. 
They must have halted soon in any case 
With thoughts of a path back, how rough it was 
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness; 
When they were halted by a tumbled wall 
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this, 
Spending what onward impulse they still had 
In One last look the way they must not go, 
On up the failing path, where, if a stone 
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself; 
No footstep moved it. 'This is all,' they sighed, 
Good-night to woods.' But not so; there was more. 
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them 
Across the wall, as near the wall as they. 
She saw them in their field, they her in hers. 
The difficulty of seeing what stood still, 
Like some up-ended boulder split in two, 
Was in her clouded eyes; they saw no fear there. 
She seemed to think that two thus they were safe. 
Then, as if they were something that, though strange, 
She could not trouble her mind with too long, 
She sighed and passed unscared along the wall. 
'This, then, is all. What more is there to ask?' 
But no, not yet. A snort to bid them wait. 
A buck from round the spruce stood looking at them 
Across the wall as near the wall as they. 
This was an antlered buck of lusty nostril, 
Not the same doe come back into her place. 
He viewed them quizzically with jerks of head, 
As if to ask, 'Why don't you make some motion? 
Or give some sign of life? Because you can't. 
I doubt if you're as living as you look." 
Thus till he had them almost feeling dared 
To stretch a proffering hand -- and a spell-breaking. 
Then he too passed unscared along the wall. 
Two had seen two, whichever side you spoke from. 
'This must be all.' It was all. Still they stood, 
A great wave from it going over them, 
As if the earth in one unlooked-for favour 
Had made them certain earth returned their love.

Erica and Tom at their wedding

Ellen, Mary and Erica a couple of years ago

Mark and Me

Mark, Erica and Mary in Boulder a few years ago

...and, our beloved John